(WASHINGTON) In response to the House Oversight Committee’s investigation of the Sulaimon Brown allegations, Mayor Vincent C. Gray reiterated his position that he welcomes any investigation into the matter. He previously requested the District of Columbia Attorney General to investigate the Brown allegations and said he would fully cooperate with that investigation and any others arising out of these allegations. That request was made on March 6, the day that the allegations appeared in the Washington Post.

Friday, February 4th, Mayor Vincent C. Gray announced six new appointees to his administration to move the city forward in the areas of public health and human services, rehabilitation of ex-offenders, youth, African affairs and financial services and insurance regulations.

Today Congress' new era begins. Yesterdau, the DC Vote organization, D.C. citizens, and Mayor Vincent Gray congregated at the Rayburn House Office Building to protest the city’s lack of representation and to support Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton and her hope to remain on the Committee of the Whole.

“There are, I understand, 183 democratic countries in the world,” Joanna London, one of many frustrated D.C. residents at the event, said. “Not a single one of them, except for the United States, which likes to promote democracy around the world, not a single one of these other countries deprives the people in their capitals of voting in their national legislature. I mean do you think that the people in Kabul, Afghanistan or Baghdad, Iraq do not have representation in the national legislatures? They do, but we don’t.”

London wasn’t the only one with strong words about D.C.’s lack of representation.

In less than a month, Howard University alumna Kamala Harris, J.D., (B.A. '86), will join a long line of Howard "firsts" when she is sworn in as the first woman as well as first African-American and Indian-American, to be elected as California Attorney General.

Harris, 46, led her first campaign as a freshman at Howard University for the Liberal Arts Student Council. Faculty, students and administrators knew that there was something special about her.

"I remember Kamala very well," said Rodney Green, Ph.D., chair of the Howard University Department of Economics. "She was very brilliant, a leader on campus and was destined for success. We are very proud of her historic election."

Harris was born in Oakland, California to a Jamaican father and Indian mother and raised in Berkeley. Her parents, both professors, were involved in the Civil Rights Movement and instilled in her a strong commitment to justice and public service.